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As these three professions are bound to deal with these issues of human life, it seemed to me that they must be the most powerful civilizing agencies of our time. They alone afford to a man of wealth the opportunity of mitigating the fate of the poor, with whom they daily bring him in contact.
A treaty was concluded opening Chemulpo, Fusan and Won-San to Japanese trade. The civilizing tide pressed in, and by 1883 the United States, France, England and Germany had all concluded treaties and Korea was open to the outside world. The government of Korea at this time was simply an organized system of robbery and extortion wearing not even the mask of justice.
Lord Cromer quotes this dictum in his work on Egypt as giving an epitome of the kind of power behind the civilizing process as it has always manifested itself in the land of the Nile; and then, lest those of his readers who live in the glass house of English history should commit the ridiculous sin of unconscious hypocrisy, he gently but firmly reminds us that many inhumanities of a similar spirit, especially towards offenders against the laws of property, were not suppressed in England till the beginning of the nineteenth century.
What was of most consequence to the world at large and to history, it produced, though probably not so much in the way of obedience to recognised principle as of noble instinct, a signal mitigation of Conquest, which was then the universal habit, but from being extermination and destruction, at best slavery or forcible transplantation, became under the Romans a supremacy, imposed indeed by force, and at the cost of much suffering, yet, in a certain sense civilizing, and not exercised wholly without regard for the good of the subject races.
It need scarcely be said, however, that such a work must enlarge its boundaries very much, in order to make any appreciable impression on the vast amount of such destitution. Here, nevertheless, is the germ, and it is already fructifying most successfully. The other institutions, dealing with larger masses of children, aim at civilizing them at home, and so making each home a centre of influence.
It was a humane but visionary plan which Reverend Jedidiah Morse in 1822 presented to the Secretary of War as the correct method of procedure in the task of civilizing the Indians. At various centers in the Indian country were to be established "Education Families" groups of honest, industrious whites who were to have houses and farms, where the natives could observe their activities.
For his own part, he added, although he had sent many Indians to Spain to be sold, it was always with a view to their being instructed in the Christian faith, and in civilized arts and usages, and afterwards sent back to their island to assist in civilizing their countrymen.
None of my readers can be ignorant of the horrid cruelties that were exercised by the conquerors of Mexico and Peru; cruelties which can never be remembered, without blushing for religion and human nature. But to undertake expeditions with a design of civilizing the world, and meliorating its condition, is a noble object.
However much Germany may have been convinced that Germany was destined to be a civilizing force in the world, the moral obligation thus aroused, we may be sure, did not become the real motive of the war.
To doubt the validity of the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and moon as the style of Louis Quatorze. The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political energy.
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